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    I don't think Steven is thinking that choosing a secure hashing algorithm will protect him from hacks. But it does protect him in the event that your DB access gets compromised. LinkedIn used SHA1 (!!) hashes without a salt (!!); that's unbelievably bad. Steven wants to pick a more secure algorithm and he is right to do so. Nothing is 100% secure obviously; you can only try to make it very unlikely that a hash will get brute forced in a feasible amount of time. Commented Jun 8, 2012 at 13:30
  • Well, I actually wanted to make my user list publicly accessible from the website and include the hashed passwords since nobody can decrypt them. No, of course not, just kidding :-P. @Cloud is absolutely right, but the fault is on me. I should have done a better job in describing in my question that I know this, but this is something that is so obvious for me, that it is easy to forget. Commented Jun 8, 2012 at 13:44
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    But attacking a decent hash compared to what linkedin did is more expensive by a factor of at least a billion. Commented Jun 8, 2012 at 15:28